This invention relates to technologies by multiprocessors, and it particularly relates to a technology by which to execute the interrupt processings in a multiprocessor system.
Along with recent years' significant advance of computer graphics technology and image processing technology, which are used in the areas of computer games, digital broadcasting and the like, there is demand for information processing apparatuses, such as computers, game machines and televisions, to have the capacity to process image data of higher definition at higher speed. In order to realize high-performance arithmetic processing in such information processing apparatuses, effective is a method in which a plurality of tasks are processed in parallel, in the information processing apparatus provided with a plurality of processors, by allocating tasks to the respective processors. Since a plurality of processors execute a plurality of tasks in cooperation with one another, it is required that the task be efficiently allotted to each processor in accordance with each processor's status.
Among those tasks, there is a task to be executed in preference to the other tasks when an event occurs. Hereinafter, such a task to be executed, in preference to the other tasks, upon the occurrence of an event will be referred to as an “interrupt task”. A processing for executing an interrupt task will be called an “interrupt processing”.
When the overhead from the event occurrence until the start of the interrupt task by any of processors becomes large, the real-timeliness of interrupt processing is impaired.